Page 23 of Born to Run Back
Theo
Tuesday,2:25a.m.,nineweeks since the coffee shop
The canvas bag sat heavy in my hands as I knelt beside what we’d built together in our beautiful, shared madness. Six months of thoughtful devotion spread before me in the moonlight tonight.
Concentric circles of painted stones.
Dried, dead flowers braided between rocks like offerings to gods we’d invented in our anguish.
Dr. Probst had been unrelenting during our last session: “You need to say goodbye to it, Theo. To the shrine, to the fantasy, to whatever you’ve been using to avoid your actual grief.”
Six weeks of therapy had given me words for what Wendy and I had done here. Crisis bonding. Displaced grief. The way I’d projected all my unprocessed loss onto a stranger and called it love. Mom’s death, my own crushing loneliness, the terror of finally being seen by somebody—I’d wrapped it all up in vanilla perfume and thirty-seven minutes of trauma and convinced myself it was destiny.
But sitting here now, surrounded by the evidence of our mirrored and parallel breakdowns, I understood something Dr. Probst’s clinical language hadn’t and couldn’t quite capture. This place had been sacred, even if it nearly destroyed us both. We’d poured our hearts into these painted stones, even if our hearts had been too broken to know what they were really saying.
I began the careful work of dismantling our shrine. Each painted rock went into the bag with something approaching reverence—not because I wanted to preserve our obsession, but because I wanted to honor what it had all meant. The clawing need to matter. The aching hunger for connection. The way two strangers had somehow found each other in the darkness and built something beautiful from their shared terror.
Even if it had been the wrong move for all of the wrong reasons.
The sound of an approaching car made my pulse stutter. It was that familiar Honda purr I’d know anywhere. For a moment, the old electricity shot through my chest; that dangerous, intoxicating pull. Then, Dr. Probst’s voice, easy and steady and calm: “Feelings aren’t facts, Theo. You can acknowledge them without being controlled by them.”
Her headlights shone like sunlight across the canyon as she rounded the curve, and I watched her park in the exact spot she’d always parked, where her car had been the night of the accident, and then again when we’d reunited weeks later. But this time, she sat motionless for a long time, staring straight ahead, before finally cutting the engine, as if gathering the courage for what came next.
To face me.
When she finally emerged, I could see she had supplies of her own. A cardboard box. Work gloves. The practical tools of someone who’d come to the same difficult conclusion I had.
“Theo. Hello.” Her voice held none of that wild, electric agony that had defined every interaction between us. Instead, it carried something I’d never heard before: peace. Exhaustion, yes, but the kind that seemed to come from hard work rather than sleeplessness and obsession.
“Wendy.” I rose slowly, my hands full of painted stones that caught the moonlight like miniature stars. “I guess we had the same idea.”
She approached with the poised, delicate grace of someone who’d learned to walk steadily again after months of stumbling. In the silver moonlight, I could see she looked… different. Healthier. Like she’d actually been sleeping through the night, eating real food, living in daylight instead of haunting canyon roads at three in the morning.
“We were both drowning, weren’t we?” she said, her voice soft, gaze sweeping across the memorial we’d built together, stone by painted stone.
“Completely.” I placed another handful of rocks into my bag, each one releasing its painful hold on my chest as it disappeared. “That night… what we did… it wasn’t really about each other.”
“No,” she agreed as she began gathering the small trinkets with the same reverence I’d been showing the stones, as if we both understood this wasn’t destruction but liberation. “It was about not wanting to be alone with what we’d witnessed, right? We bonded over the crisis, not each other.”
The truth settled between us like early morning light, illuminating everything we’d been too desperate to see before. We worked quietly in companionable silence, dismantling our shrine piece by piece, our movements synchronized in a way that felt both familiar and entirely new. This time, there was no urgent edge, no frantic energy. Just two people doing very necessary work together, finally clear about what they were really saying goodbye to.
Wendy
Six weeks with my therapist's patient guidance had taught me to recognize the difference between processing grief and feeding the hungry ghost of obsession.
“You can honor what you witnessed,” Lauren had said gently but firmly, “without building your entire life around it, Wendy.”
Moving beside Theo in the moon-washed darkness felt like a choreography we’d been rehearsing for months and months without knowing it. But this time, the dance was about release rather than accumulation, about letting go rather than holding on. The wild, frantic electricity that had characterized every moment between us had been replaced by something quieter, more honest. More real.
“I went to see Delaney,” I said as I carefully wrapped up the laminated star chart, the one that was of last October’s constellations, the night sky that had watched us kneel in the rain and do our best to help two kids who’d gotten into a horrific car wreck. “At the facility where she’s staying.”
Theo paused in his methodical stone-gathering, his heartbreaking blue eyes finding mine across our dismantled garden. “How is she?”
“Broken. But honest about it in a way I wasn’t ready to be.” I placed the star chart in my cardboard box, planning to mail it to her later along with a letter of apology I’d been writing and rewriting for weeks. “She called me out. Said I’d been using their trauma to build myself a shrine to feel important.”
Theo glanced at me, his brows furrowed in thought. “Was she right?”
“Yeah.” The admission tasted clean on my tongue, a confession without the weight of shame. “I think I was grieving my own loneliness more than Beck’s death. And I used you… usedusas a way to avoid facing that emptiness.”
